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Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England

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I am a great fan of Amanda Vickery's books. And I think that they should be required reading for anyone interested in the social history of the Georgian era.

Her previous work, "The Gentleman's Daughter" was a wonderfully detailed exploration of the intimate lives of women in the 18th century and helped many of us to a greater understanding of Jane Austen's female character's lives, setting them in a recognisable historical context .Her new book "Behind Closed Doors : at home in Georgian England" once again takes the domestic realm as it subject but details it on a much wider scale.

She does not concentrate on one class of people but considers, in minute detail, the intimate lives of landladies and lodgers, tradesmen and women, professionals and aristocrats living in both London and in the provinces.

Its scale is breathtaking and the detail, delicious. And what I really adore is that she admits the historical truth of Jane Austen's writings by including copious quotes from the six novels to illustrate her points. Indeed, she devotes almost half a chapter of the book to consider the way in which the subject of the home is treated by Austen's heroines and heroes, even going so far as to paraphrase the famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Georgian house with a drawing room, French windows and lawns must be in want of a mistress..."

It was an irresistible and understandable opportunity ....I daresay had I been given the chance to play with that famous line, I would not have let it pass either...

While reading Professor Vickery's descriptions of the lives and experiences of real individuals the Jane Austen devotee will find many parallels with the situations in which her characters find themselves.

The book is beautifully produced , printed on fine glossy paper and illustrated in black and white and colour with very appropriate and carefully chosen illustrations.

I confess I have devoured this book and read it quickly almost at one sittting.I am going to revisit it over the next few weeks savouring its detail. I highly recommend this book to you: anyone who is keen on Jane Austen's works will enjoy delving into the minutiae of real people's lives - especially as many of the lives have telling details which echo in Austen's works.

Is it too much to hope that this book will soon appear in a Kindle edition?

An Englishman's home, as the saying goes, may be his castle, but three hundred years ago it was becoming so much more. In the 18th century, the English home served as a place in which its inhabitants sought to define themselves through the use of décor. As more people socialized in their homes, their living spaces became venues in which their identity could be displayed for others to see for themselves. The emergence and development of this trend is the subject of Amanda Vickery's book, which analyzes the lives of the men and women of Georgian England by examining the homes in which they lived.

In studying Georgian homes, Vickery uses a number of different perspectives. Among her goals is the reintroduction of men into the picture, which she does most notably in her chapter on the homes of bachelors. Yet as she demonstrates, the furnishing and decoration of homes was predominantly a female concern, albeit one often handled in consultation with the men of the household. Such decisions were often mundane, and focused more on simple maintenance rather than grand refurbishment, but all of them reflected the interests of the participants and were shaped by the concept of "taste" that emerged during this period, which charted a path that increasing numbers were compelled to take.

Detailed, insightful, and well-written, Vickery's book offers a fascinating examination of life in Georgian England. Because of the limitations of her sources, it is by necessity an examination focused primarily on the upper classes, yet she succeeds in taking account books, ledgers, and other mundane sources to reconstruct their lives, showing the growing importance of home life and the weight contemporaries placed on defining their domestic environment. Her success in unearthing these details and bringing the Georgian world back to life makes this book a necessary read for anyone interested in 18th century England, one that will likely serve as an indispensable study of the subject for decades to come.

OK, it's probably my fault; I thought this book was something it is not. But, gee, when an author uses the words `behind,' `closed,' and `doors' in series, it seems reasonable for the prospective reader to assume that they will learn what went on, well, behind closed doors in the designated period. Perhaps I was spoiled, and inadvertently misled, by Judith Flanders' superb "Inside the Victorian Home" whose title implied we would be told what went on, you know, inside the Victorian home. And we certainly were. Ms. Flanders figuratively takes the reader by the hand and serves as an expert guide as they move together through the typical Victorian home and learn not only about the layout, function and furnishing of each room but, more importantly, about what went on in them, how people actually lived therein. Ms. Vickery's book, on the other hand, is the story of folks who lived in the Georgian period, the things they owned, and the, uh, relationship between those people and those things. Oh, she describes the general layout of various kinds of abodes, and uses case histories to describe the lives and fortunes of many coevals. But the story of how they actually lived in those habitats was apparently beyond her brief. But there's a whole lot of information about wallpaper and sewing methods and materials, and that sort of thing. Indeed, one might fairly characterize the work as a Georgian `Better Homes & Gardens.' Just don't call it social history because it certainly is not. For that aspect of the period, I refer you to Roy Porter's wonderful "English Society in the Eighteenth Century." Because for me at least, this book's title 'doors' were never opened.

One of my greatest treasurs is my National Trust membership card. Over the last few decades I have spent many hours looking at Trust properties and wondering about the people who lived there, the why's and wherefore's of their domestic interiors and also visiting museums of buildings and domestic life. A lot of questions were answered in this book. We learn, for example, about the evolution of the dining room, the parlour and the kitchen, of locks on doors and the meaning of a hallway as opposed to a great hall. Most moving of all, we learn about the origins of domestic privacy and having a space to call one's own and a locked box to keep one's most intimate posessions.

This is a scholarly book with many layers of information backed up by the most minute of research. In various chapters we study privacy and its truest meaning, about bachelor life, setting up the marital home, the differing domestic domains of men and women, personal bookkeeping, the tribulations of the spinster and widow, personalising living space, adorning it through craftwork and a final interesting chapter on the beginnings of modern advertising through targeting the sexes in the world of shopping. Excellently and lavishly illustrated, this is a real treasure of a book.

If I have one complaint, it's about the actual physical book itself. I read a library edition and it was printed on semi-gloss paper (making it difficult under a good reading light) and my copy weighed 2lbs, 6oz. Not exactly good for reading in bed and it was a bit to lug around for reading during my lunch hours!

This book was surprisingly gripping; I could not wait to get to it each day. Vickery has a great grasp of her subject matter and covers all the attendant issues of domesticity: patriarchy, matriarchy, exchange, public/private, gender, &c. Broader implications of architecture, colonialism, and utilitarianism also make appearances without getting too lit crit on you. I won't get into too much detail here, but if this time period interests you at all, you'll be hooked. ONE criticism, however: there were several agreement errors (...once a gentleman outfitted THEIR home...), so many in fact that I considered that allowing this sort of mistake must be the new copyediting rule over at Yale UP. However, when I saw Elizabeth Bennet (ONE T, people!) misspelled, I realized that the errata were all just sloppiness. It seems to me that checking the spelling of a major literary character's name against the original text would be a simple enough task for both author and copyeditor. The world is going to the dogs!

That said, I still enjoyed this book for its balance of the trivial/scholarly.

This is a very interesting book. It gives insight into the lives of the people we see on many Masterpiece Theatres. It is printed on really beautiful paper, which is a really nice touch.

this is so well researched that sometimes I feel like the girl who said (of Moby Dick) "this teaches me more than I want to know." It was interesting, the pathetic search for a bit of privacy among the terribly poor - the sometimes desperate lives of women living on wealthy, isolated estates completely at the mercy of domineering or psychotic husbands - but the chapter on the significance of wall paper, for example, was utterly boring. It's one of those books I was glad to have read, but probably won't ever pick up again.

One of the reasons that I like history so much is learning that people are the same no matter when they lived. They have the same hopes and dreams. They love their children and hate their in-laws. They have good bosses and bad bosses, and bouts of unemployment. They feud with their neighbors and their extended families. They are just like us but without indoor plumbing and cable.

Amanda Vickery has delved into the treasury trove of diaries, retail records, probate records and household account books to provide us with a detailed and intimate look at life during the Georgian period which she defines as 1660 to 1850. We catch glimpses into the lives of bachelors, spinsters, tradespeople and the wealthy. Changing tastes and habits are traced through styles of furniture and wallpaper. Most surprising to me were the number of "lodgers", people renting one or two rooms in a house, in cities during this period.

As fascinating as the details in this book are, I found myself vaguely disappointed. I realized that I already knew most of the information presented by Ms. Vickery through my reading of Jane Austen. In fact, Ms. Vickery quotes Jane Austen frequently in support for her conclusions. Jane Austen's vivid descriptions of the homes and lives of her characters are perfect illustrations of the very people that Ms. Vickery is trying to bring to life for us.

Which leads me to wonder, do we really need this book? Are Jane Austen's books not "history" because they are fiction? Perhaps "Behind Closed Doors" would better be described as finding the factual basis for Jane Austen's fictional world. Budding novelists are always advised to write what they know which is exactly what Jane Austen did. How well she wrote about the world she knew, is shown by Ms. Vickery's extensive research into the life and times of the people of Georgian England.